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ShareRichard Julian can only chuckle when asked how it feels to be known as “one of the music industry’s best-kept secrets,” a sobriquet the singer-songwriter has earned thanks to the four underappreciated quality CDs he has released over the last decade, his work with Norah Jones and endorsements from Randy Newman and Bonnie Raitt.
“Yes, I’ve hung in a certain zone for a while,” says Julian, speaking from his home in Brooklyn. “Maybe the new record will break that spell.”
The Delaware-born Julian is referring to “Sunday Morning in Saturday’s Shoes.” When the CD is released Feb. 26, there’s no reason why Julian shouldn’t reach a wider audience.
At the moment, Julian is showcasing several “Sunday Morning” tracks while touring as Suzanne Vega’s opening act. “It’s been really cool,” says Julian. “Our audiences are really compatible. We’re both lyric-driven kind of songwriters, but with two different kinds of attitude.”
Asked to elaborate, Julian says, “I would say the things she writes about are written about at more of a distance, a cool remove. My thing is the stark opposite.”
Indeed, as on previous discs, Julian’s songs are distinguished by his knack for detail and sometimes ironic point of view.
While he intends to sprinkle in a few tracks from 2005’s “Slow New York” and maybe one or two tunes from 1998’s much-lauded “Smash Palace,” Julian prefers to emphasize new material.
“The best thing for me when it comes to songwriting and performing is to keep hitting my recent stuff,” he explains. “Playing new songs live is a real test for them. Otherwise, by relying on your old stuff to get you through, you may not be writing up to the level of your best work.”
Julian’s songs are often written in reaction to his surroundings, and inspiration, it seems, can strike anywhere. For example, “God III,” a breezy, jazz-tinted tune about a divine slacker that sounds like a Randy Newman-Michael Franks creation, had its genesis in 2004, while Julian was on a tour bus in the Midwest.
“That title came up during a conversation (when) one of the band members who had been raised very secularly asked how many children Jesus had. Someone said, `Oh, you mean `God the Third’? ...
“It took me almost three years to finish,” he adds, noting he wrote the first verse on the bus, but put aside the song after hearing Dylan’s “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” and “Visions of Johanna.” “That made me think it might not be as a good a song as I thought,” says Julian.
He finally completed the tune after rediscovering it in a notebook. “For a long time it seemed like a silly idea. I almost resisted writing it, but the idea kept coming back, like musical acid reflux.”
“A Thousand Days” is far more elliptical, even elusive in its intention, and Julian prefers to keep it that way. “It’s just a relationship song, but maybe a little more than that,” he says. “It came from a traumatic experience. To say what it’s about would almost diminish it.”
While many of Julian’s songs are rooted in folk, “World Keeps On” adds a reggae flavor and a wry fatalism to the mix. And this observation - “I was sitting in a little cafe down by the sea, looking out, looking out, across the ocean/Couple at the bar watching the war on TV/‘Such a shame,’ I heard her say/‘We forgot the lotion’” - suggests what a Lyle Lovett-Garland Jeffreys collaboration might produce.
“The song says `That’s the way the world turns, and there’s not a lot you can do about it,’ ” says Julian. “That fatalistic point of view floats across my frontal lobes very often. But I don’t feel any obligation to avoid that kind of thing. My obligation is to follow little kernels of inspiration wherever they go.”
He did just that with “Man in the Hole,” a sad folk parable about man twisted and ultimately isolated by ambition.
“I got the idea sitting in car outside someone’s apartment,” Julian says. “I phoned the idea to my home answering machine. ... When it came time to write it, it didn’t resist. I had a good time writing that song.”
Ditto the jazzy “Syndicated,” a snappy number about cultural homogenization that Dan Hicks would love. “That started while I was touring with Rosanne Cash in London. When we walked out of the hotel, I saw a Starbucks and a Pier One and I said, `Where the hell am I?’ At rest stops throughout America, if you see a palm tree, you know you’re in Florida, Texas or California. If not, you don’t know where the hell you are,” says Julian.
“Getting off the beaten path to find something more individual is getting harder and harder. ... People like what they know. But I hate the comfort of what I know.”
